Billa

How many times the same story is remade has little to make with the success of the movie. Billa falls into that category. Though this is the fourth version of the movie "Don" the director has made sure that the film is little different from the older version. The most important aspect of the film is the style of Ajith, i saw a different Ajith on the screen. Though i am not an Ajith fan, today got impressed with Ajith's style. The director Vishuvardhan has made sure that only the positive aspects of Ajith go to the screen.

Once one of my friends told me the most negative aspect of Ajith is his eyes and the way he speaks his dialogues. You wont see any of these in that movie, bcoz his eyes are hidden behind a neat cooling glass for most of the movie and for a change Ajith speaks as little dialogues as possible. Prabhu impresses in the role he adorns but i have very little clue as to why the audience start laughing when he starts speaking serious dialogues. Nayanthara impresses in few scenes. Namitha as usual, no role in the movie except for an item number. The credit goes to vishnuvardhan for the rich set that is seen in almost all part of the movie. The background and costumes for the actors are well chosen and there could not be a better match.

The movie differs in almost all aspects with the previous version. The entire film is done in malaysia and not even in one scene they come to India. Though Rajini's dance steps are not good his style over shadows that but Ajith's dance was a disaster and it was visible fully in the screen.  Other than that it is a good movie worth watching. Great because of the richness that is visible through out the movie and you get an opportunity to see an entirely different Ajith after a long time.

Life is beautiful

This weekend i got the opportunity to watch the two movies, one of which i was trying to see for a very long time. One was a hindi movie "Kal Ho Naa Ho" and the next movie was "Life is beautiful"(ofcourse with subtitles). Two beautiful movies which created a lot of impact. I had been trying to see "Kal Ho Naa Ho" for a very long time after i heard about that from my friends. It lived upto my expectations.

The next movie which created a huge impact was the film "Life is beautiful". It is an old movie and it takes you back to 1939, and is about the discrimination of Jews by Germans. The story is about a Jewish Father "Guido" who struggles hard to hide the cruelties of war from his son. The entire family taken as slaves by Germans and the rule is to kill the old and the children. Here starts the hero imagination where he explains to his son that they are in a interesting game and with his presence of mind manages to describe  every situation as a part of game. It is the story of how he makes  the life beautiful for his son while it is actually the reverse happening.  A movie worth watching.

A busy week

Had been busy for the past two weeks committing some mistakes and spending the whole week trying to rectify those so could not get enough time to update this blog. Anyway now found some time to do it. Nothing has happened over two weeks. Had remained glued to the computer for around 12 hours from 8.30 A.M to 8.30 P.M. Work in the morning and sleep in the night, that is what i am doing for the past two weeks. Just wondering whether the job was difficult or whether i am wasting time. Nothing much happened  so this post is just a place holder to maintain the habit of blogging :)

Techies in TV - Paadum Office

Wanted this to be a quick and small post for one simple reason, lack of time. Two days visit to home town during the weekend and wanted to blog about  few things that caught my attention. One thing was about Azhagiya Tamil Magan, looks like it is doing a very bad business at the box office  and in my city they have released vijay's film "Thirumalai", may be in an attempt satisfy Vijay fans. Ajith fans now would be hoping that "Billa" does not contain any foolish acts, since there is a high probability for it becoming a huge hit for Ajith if it is reasonably good.

Was so busy during the weekend, trying my hand at cooking and sucessfully managed to cook edible sambhar. After eating Sambhar in Bangalore, even my sambhar was delicious. For a change spent very little time in Television, but noticed two things to blog about.  One is that Vijay TV's Jodi No 1 ended this week. The most notable point as usual Simbu's dialogue. As usual he talked as though he is the only hero and best hero in TN. Looked like there is only one another guy who can talk like him. As you might have predicted it is none other than his father TR.

Yet another television program that attracted me a little is "Paadum Office" where techies are given opportunity to sing in groups. It was good and yet another innovative approach from Vijay TV. It would interesting to see whether SUN, Jaya and Kalaingar TV follow Vijay TV's path. Most of the teams sang well. Good to see, HP getting selected for the next round. Too many topics waiting for the right time to fill the space here.

Things that never change

Today i was left without any work. Tried killing time by lying down on the bed trying to sleep, hearing FM, calling friends, reading book on python. Everthing failed and i was left with a lot of time to think about a lot of things. Was thinking about the Cricket match i saw last week when i visited home. Nothing seems to be changing in Indian cricket. Though youngsters come in, seniors are shown the exit doors but the trend continues.  The intention of this post is not to criticise. Here are few things which i felt has never changed since i started watching cricket.

1) What ever be the score 300 or 200, Indian team always  struggles to win and make sure the match is always interesting.

2) Same way, whether they score 300 or 350 while batting first, they make sure that the opposition come closer to the target.

3) There is atleast one bowler in the indian team who will gift away runs in the final over.

4) Indian bowlers make sure that they don't bowl yorkers even during the final overs.

5) Even if there is just one fielder in the offside, Ganguly makes sure that the ball goes to him for a catch.

6) Tail enders follow the top order batsmen. If the top order batsmen bat well, the tail enders will become pinch hitters and will blast the bowlers to all corners of the ground. If the top order fail, they collapse altogether.

7) Most of the fans switch off the TV once sachin gets out and if the score is high.

8) Last, how bad they perform in a series, there are always fans like me who still support the team and hope they win the next series.

FM to kill time

During the first week in bangalore, i found around 50% of the people with head phones plugged in their ears and eyes closed. It looked odd, this is not the scene i usually see in my home town. I never tried to tune into the FM frequencies here assuming that most of them would be in Kannada, the language which i am still finding difficult to master. After hearing that there are some hindi FM channels also, decided to give it a try. Looks like there are seven FM channels here in bangalore and most of them play songs 24x7. Some notable channels i usually prefer listening to are Fever 104, SRM, Radio mirchi and Radio city. It was through these channels i keep in touch with the latest hindi songs and try to find some good songs in kannada. My favourite is Fever 104. They play hindi and english songs 24x7. Listening to Fever 104 has become a daily activity. Without computer and Television at home, FM is the only option i am left with and it seems to be a good option to kill some time when left alone without any work.

The forgotten subject

Was looking at a crossword in the newspaper, aiming to find atleast few answers. Bind brightened on seeing something that is relavant and what i have studied for around 6 years. The enthusiasm died in a minute once i started to think about the answer. The question was imple, "What is the unit of magnetic flux" I spent the next 30 minutes trying to the sqeeze the answer out of mind. It has gone completely out of the mind. The newspaper reported the answer as Gauss. Looks like the SI unit of magnetic flux is weber, probably gauss is in CGS. Was discussing about this with my friend while walking to the office, he asked a few more questions like difference between AC motor and DC motor. Was not able to answer anything  except for a smile. Asked the same question to few other colleagues here. I am not the only one in this state. Physics has gone completely out of the mind. The same goes for other subjects like chemistry, biology.  History is already a history.

In school i used to admire Physics for the reason it deals with what happens around us. At times i feel i should revive the physics knowledge. I know that would not happen, my laziness would make sure  that i don't do things like that :)

My Tamil Blog

I started a new tamil blog a week back. No specific purpose behind starting that blog. Felt like starting a blog in tamil. Hence the result is http://ssenthilkumaran.wordpress.com. Using the TamilKey plugin for Firefox to write in Tamil. Heard about the tamilkey plugin from my friend subamani. Click here to see his tamil blog. What does it contain, as usual my rants about movies, life, songs and everything that manages to catch my attention. Other than all these, something that you can find in that blog is spelling mistakes. Never in the life i was able to get rid of the spelling mistakes in that blog. Hope to reduce and produce some good posts in tamil soon. Till then bear with me :)

The paradise lost

I took this snap when i was rummaging my belongings. These  xerox papers made me nostalgic as i started thinking about those great moments in college. Though i used to collect all the xerox papers, rarely i completed them before the exam. The xerox collection process itself is interesting. During the first year i tried hard to get the book or atleast take the xerox well before the exam. It was exactly opposite during the final year. I remember collecting xerox the day before the examination. I was not even willing to spend some money to take xerox for some subjects. During college days collecting xerox and managing them, searching and locating the xerox before the exam were difficult tasks. After coming out of the college, everything done in college looks beautiful. College looks like "The paradise lost" Yeah, Past appears beautiful as long as the present goes well. Managed to upload most of the photos taken during college days relying on  google servers than on my system hard disk. You can find them here. Now spending time browsing through these pictures and talking with friends about the fun that we had in college. Hmmm.. Life is treacherous.

ATM songs rock..

This is about the remixed songs in the tamil cinema. Almost all films recently released have one or two remixed songs. Malaikotai had one, the remix of "Ennama kannu" in "Thiruvillaiyadal Aarambam" was a hit. Latest in line is the songs from "Azhagiya Tamil magan" or ATM as it is called popularly. Azhagiya Tamilmagan contains the remix of the the famous song "Ponmagal Vanthaal", if i am right the famous song of sivaji and K.R.Vijaya. In ARR hands the remix looks good. Except for few lines i was not able to understand or even guess other lines. Looks more like a english songs. As usual ARR stands apart from other Music directors and almost all of the songs in the film rocks.

Since i am running out of time, i am stoppign here. Check out of this link for hearing ATM songs http://www.hummaa.com/albumpage.php?pg=ja&lg=14&lc=Movies&md=24102

Kana Kaanum Kaalangal

If you are passionate about tamil television programmes, you should have recogonised what the post is about from the title. If you are not a television buff like me, this post may not interest you to a greater extent.

This post is about the serial "Kana Kaanum Kaalangal" in Star Vijay which has managed to gather itself a huge fan following. I am usually against the television serials since i found most of them to revolve around a heroine and a crowd around her, with new problems bombarding them 24x7 and they never stop crying at all. They suck all the happiness that is left in you. But Kana Kaanum Kallangal looks a little different. It takes you back to the school days and differs from the usual mega serials in a lot of aspects. I won't tell that it is free from all trademarks of megaserial but it is worth watching. It has already become popular and Vijay TV is capitalising well on the popularity the serial has achieved. One thing that i like about Vijay TV is they are innovative (though i have a doubt whether they copy from hindi star channels) in few aspects when compared to other tamil television channels which copy the concepts from them.

The latest hobby : Learning to juggle

Without my best friends television and Computer at home, i am exploring other possible ways of spending some time. Though i try to spend most of the time in office i find myself having a lot of time to spend :). One thing which i got interested and which i am trying to learn during my free time is juggling. As usual the inspiration was from one of my seniors here. I saw him Juggling three balls with ease. Since there is no other work at home, thought of doing it. When i tried Juggling i realized i have never used the right brain or the brain that controls the left part of the body.  The left hand refused to cooperate and it was difficult to throw the ball accurately.  With songs in Fever 104 (FM) giving me company i tried juggling for  last two days and i am yet to get a hang of it. But it looks like a good practice and may be it could turn you ambidexterous. One more thing good about juggling is that, i got a topic to post in my blog :)

Today was amazed to see the plethora of sites that turned up when i searched for Juggling in google. These sites also have a step by step procedure to learn juggling as well. Lets see how it goes. If everything goes well may be there will be one more post about it.

Found this link to be useful - http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-juggle-3-balls

cscope with emacs

During my college days i have never heard of cscope at all. The first tool that my mentor asked me to study was cscope as it is often difficult to read large source codes without cscope. I found it difficult to first use cscope since by default opens the source code in vi which i have never used. Heard that cscope can be integrated and gave it a try. It was not a difficult process at all. All you have to do is to set the EDITOR environment variable to emacs, so that cscope opens the files in emacs. You can safely set the EDITOR environment variable in .profile so that it is set every time you login. And for navigation you need to creat TAG table file for Emacs. Emacs has the solution in hand. All you have to do is to use the etags binary that comes with emacs.

The command ( etags `find . -name "*.[h|c]"` )  would create the TAGS file which emacs uses for navigating tags. Now to navigate `M-.` would take you the definition of a function or variable. `C-u M-.` would take you to the next definition. To return back to the original place where the search started the key binding is `C-u M-*`. There are number of cscope.el files available in internet which makes the navigation job easier but i did not try them as i was contented with this.

Subconscious mind at work

Usually i am a like a dead body while i sleep. After coming out of home to work, i am getting weird dreams with combining the new and old characters that have crossed my life Here is one such dream that i felt like sharing. The dream was about Harry Potter. dreams goes on like this. Harry Potter was hiding in a lonely house, which is near to a waterfalls along with his friend Ron. The house has a single door which connects to another portion of the same house about which Harry does not have idea. One day he finds a small hole in the door and through the door is terrified to find that the occupants of the other room were none other than his enemies Crabbe, Goyle and one more guy. Suddenly they start breaking the door, Harry and Ron are left with no option other than hiding in one room. As the sounds of foot steps increase, Harry's trepidation increase. They were not enemies after all because the one who played the role of Harry Potter was none other than myself, the face that got associated with Ron was that of my friend Praveen. Crabbe and Goyle were none other than my school friends. Hmmm it was a weird dream, i have no clue why Harry Potter came in my dream, how it got associated with real life characters etc. It might look like loads of bullshit but to me it was an interesting dream which i still remember :)

While i was at home i slept like a rock unmindfull of what is happening around me. After coming to this new city to work i am getting weird dreams like this. I am not the only person getting dreams like this, read this link for yet another interesting dream of my friend.

Chak De India

The opportunity to see "Chak de India" came in the form of team outing. Yesterday i was at Inox along with my team members to see "Chak De India". The movie turned out to be a great entertainer. The director managed to create magic with Sharukh Khan and 11 other girls. The story starts with a high tension hockey final between India and Pakistan. Indian lose because of miscalculated penalty shot by Shahrukh, who is the captain. After the match shahrukh is accused of getting bribes and is pushed out of  the team. He returns to hockey after 7 years as the coach of Indian women hockey team. How he solves the differences that exist between the team and what they achieve forms the rest of the story.

Shahrukh looks a lot matured and as usual does the role well. Dialogues are plus point but with little knowledge in hindi i could pickup only a few. The hockey matches look realistic. It was a great performance altogether and is a movie worth watching many times.

World Cup Atlast :)

Finally found some time to blog. So many things to blog about but could not find the right time. Finally had to sneak into browsing center near my home to post about the topic that half of India is chanting now. The victory of the Men in Blue against their arch rivals. I did not get an opportunity to see the match as we did not have a TV at home and was looking at my system's monitor eagerly waiting for the scores to get updated. Finally had to call my friend who managed to settle in a hotel to hear the commentary. He did a fine job indeed in updating ball by ball status and also in describing  the

If i am right this is the first time India and Pak are meeting in final of a great event like the world cup. If it was some other team the fans here might have digested a defeat, i doubt whether it would be the same against Pak. Anyway the end result was great and Men in Blue continued the winning streak against Pak in both the world cup and the T20 World Cup. Hats off to them. I don't know how the Indian team handled the pressure during the final overs but we were at the edge of our seats when the final over was bowled. When the final wicket fell, crackers lit up the sky. The celebration continued late night.  Finally India has won the world cup.

My Remembrall - Emacs Planner

Started using yet another feature of Emacs. The latest feature i am using is the Planner mode in Emacs. I was badly in need of a something to keep track of things as the silly little brain of mine was not able to keep track of everything. What i wanted was some sort of mechanism to remind me about the work i have and tasks that i need to complete. But what emacs gave was something different. Emacs Planner has a lot of features than what i expected. All you need to use planner in emacs is to download Planner and Muse and copy it into elisp folders or home folders and add configure your .emacs file to load planner. Planner requires the wiki feature of Muse so it is necessary to install Muse first. To get planner working for you, there is a detailed procedure starting from emacs installation to installing and configuring Planner. This link http://pigpog.com/node/1974 contains a step by step procedure to install emacs, install and configure planner and steps to use planner.

If the topic does not make sense to you, read this.

Twenty20 - Namma Game

Atlast found some time and a topic to blog :)

The last time i played some cricket was when i studied Xth standard. The way we played the game was mazing. The match consisted was of maximum of ten overs. The main aim of the batsman was to see the ball and swing the bat with full speed so that it crosses the boundary. Running between the wickets was funny, most of the time no one noticed where the batsmen hit the ball. Wherever it is, they ran and were successfull at times.

When i saw the Twenty20 match last week, it looked to me like there is a striking similarity between the T20 and the street cricket we played. There is nothing to test except for the arm power of the batsmen. Bowlers were always at the receiving end. There is a fair chance for every team to win the match. Seeing the aggressiveness shown by the Bangaladesh batsmen in hitting the ball, looked like even they too had a chance. Looked to me like the match result depends on two or three overs. 20 - 25 runs in a over would change the entire game.

From the normal spectator perspective, T20 is awesome. Who would not like three hours of cricket match filled with sixes and fours with equal probablity of a wicket falling. T20 is absolute fun. I usually forget about the matches till i hear the roar from the nearby hostel or call from my father telling the score.

FStival '07

It was the first FStival i attended as an aluminus. It was a great feeling to visit the college again and meet the juniors and staffs out there. I went a little late after going to my home and i missed praveen's speech and the installation session. Heard that praveen gave an inspiring speech and inspite of some problems with the installation, juniors managed to finish the session in a good note. When i entered the KS auditorium, Subramani was explaining some cool compiz features and 3D desktops. After that there was a doubt clarification session during which i got the opportunity to poke my nose and utter few words.

After then it was time for the demo stalls. As usual we had stalls like GCC, GDB, Emacs, Databases, CMD, LAMP, GIMP, Games & Multimedia etc. Vim and "Linux Day to day" stalls were added this time.This time Juniors did a fine job with the demo stalls and were explaining with good examples. For the first time i saw juniors explaining Blender with some real animations. Almost all of them did fine in explaining the functionalities of the softwares. Regarding the audience, this time we had a diverse crowd ranging schools and colleges in and around Madurai and from other departments.

After all this it was time for fill the tummy and we proceeded to hotel Bell for the treat that was pending for a very long time.Praveen, Subramani and myself atlast treated our juniors :) After that headed back home to enjoy the remaining one day at home.

Managed to take only very few snaps. Check them out at http://picasaweb.google.com/sens2003

An inspiring article

As usual was reading one of the tamil weeklies, this time it was "Kumutham" because could not get Anantha vikadan. Apart from a lot of cinema news which i was mainly looking for, one article caught my attention. It was about "Importance of Time", something i never paid much attention. The way the article started was impressive. It started with comparing time with that of money since we(Namma ooru makkal) concentrate more on money and may easily understand the concept. And then it went on to calculate the salary for a minute.

If the salary for one month is 15600, then 15600/(30*24*60) = 36 paise. The point is that people who think a lot before wasting money, dont do the same before wasting time. It also claimed that time is the only thing that can be converted into growth, love, money etc etc. Hmmm seems to be true, but difficult to follow.

The Diwali Rush

This happened on Sep 7th friday. I went to office as usual and got prepared to book the train ticket for going home on Nov 6th for diwali. I expected that there would be atleast some tickets left but the entire calculation went wrong. By the time i opened the page to book ticket it was all over. Later learnt that most of my friends in office had the similar fate. None of them were successful. One more news is that, a person who stood third in the queue in railway station was not able to book the ticket

If this is the status of those who have internet access, think about the status of those who don't have access to the technology. If you ask any bangalore local here about this, the first reason he would site is the "explosion of s/w industry" here in the garden city. It has changed the entire life style of the people living here. There exist a visible partition between the techies and the other section of the people. Though the software industry has helped in the growth of the city it has created an apparent division among the two classes of people.  Though most of them will have difference of opinion in this regard, think this is the reason for incidents where techies get beaten up for no reason. The matter to be worried now is "booking ticket successfully for the return journey". Hope i am lucky this time :)

Chak De India

This post is definitely not about the movie but about the great match between India and England. After a disgusting performance in the world cup by Team India,  i decided not to pay much attention to the matches or the controversies involving cricket. But habits die hard, yesterday in a mess near my home happened to catch glimpse of the match. Soon i found myself focussing on the match more than that of the Chicken in front of me. Sachin's blistering knocks were visual treats. Though i ate slowly could not delay it beyond a certain level. At home could not sit peacefully and finally called my father at night to know the result. When i called my dad, India needed 4 runs from 3 balls and heard that Uthapa finished it in style. The noise and sound of crackers from the nearby mansion announced the mood of cricket maniacs like me. India seems to be in great form, but i am still doubtfull as India is capable of producing suprises. So i am waiting for the result of the final match with my fingers crossed. Hope they do well and come back home with  both the one day and test cup.

Uneventful Weekend

Never thought i would be going to Subramani's home so soon after last week adventure. But i was there the last weekend, unable to beat the boredom. As usual had a great lunch at Maharaja and then with great difficulty killed the laziness and geared up for a visit to the Kempfort shiva temple. Only the entrance to the temple is small, the statues of the deities in the temple are huge. The temple is well maintained and is worth visiting.

The next day we settled for a movie. This time it was a hindi movie. It was none other than the great "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai", the movie i had seen for more than fifteen times. Still had the same feeling when
i saw movie for the first time. Because of the sub titles was able to understand the movie a little better. Killing time during weekends is becoming a herculean task. Thanks to the friends and seniors here, without them life would be pretty difficult here.

Exporting Linux Display to Windows

Never knew something like this existed until i started using it on Friday. As the topic suggests it is possible to get the display of the remote GNU/Linux machine in you Windoze or any other OS. All it needs to do is to install an Xserver in the local machine. For Windoze, Xserver can be installed using the Xming package available in sourceforge. The exact location of the xming xserver is http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming. Download and install the Xming server in the machine and run it with the option ":0 -clipboard -multiwindow -ac". To change the options in windoze, right click the short cut and add "-ac" option to the list of option already available.

The steps to be done in the GNU/Linux machine is very simple, all you have to do is to export the DISPALY environment variable. So execute the command like

export DISPLAY=ipaddress:0.0

where ipaddress is the IP of the windoze machine. Now opening any GUI application like xcalc or xemacs or xterm will open a window in the Windows machine.  Though it is a well known fact that GNU/Linux command line is far more powerful, looks like this finds a use in a number of situation.

"Anantha Vikadan" to the rescue

Since i moved out of my home town to the place where i work, there is very little i hear about what is happening in my state. One thing i missed was the news about tamil movies. About three months before, most of the time was spent in college was spent on watching or atleast talking about the latest releases, actors, actresses etc.  But after coming here i was virtually cut off from the tamil cinema world.

It was at this point of time, "Anantha Vikadan" helped me. Though it was not available at all shops here, i was lucky to find a shop near my home. This was the first time i am spending time on tamil weeklies like this. "Anantha Vikadan" looks pretty good. They provide the latest news in tamil cinema like "Vidyabalan would be the heroine of Vijay's next film Kuruvi". One interesting article was about the life of "Che Guevera" the revolutionist. The short stories are also interesting, so are the little jokes. There are also pages that offer some insight into the current affairs of Tamilnadu politics. On the whole "Anantha Vikadan" is helping me in killing time and knowing something about what is happening in my state.

Weekend Movie Marathon

Could not have killed more effectively and uselessly than how we did last weekend. Watched five new tamil films continously burning the midnight oil and sacrificing a pleasant weekend sleep. As usual Praveen, Muthusivam and myself assembled at Subramani's home on saturday. At around nine the show started with a reasonably good movie starring Sundar.C. Probably because of the reason that no one has seen a new movie for months, we continued with the next movie. This time it was one of the new released Ajith's film. The film was not that good but expectations took us to the third movie and it started by around 3am.

The third film was "Thottal Poo malarum". If we were in Tamilnadu, there is very little chance that we would have seen a movie like that. When the film ended it was nearly morning. Due to the unstoppable enthu of Musi and Mani, we sat for the fourth film. The fourth films was "Arya" starring Mathavan and Bavana. Totally disgusting it was still Muthusivam, Praveen and myself managed to see the full movie. It was at around 8.20 in the morning we felt like sleeping and slept for around three hours before we started the fifth and the final film.

The fifth film was "Pallikoodam" a movie that reminded us about the school life. Resembled a little like Autograph, but has fallen short in some aspects. Still it is a movie worth watching. With that ended the "Weekend movie Marathon".

Later in the morning we realised we were not the only people to stay awake all night for the sound has kept Subramani's neighbors from sleeping too :) . Poor fellows, atleast they should have joined us for the film :) . Anyway one more night like this is a bit far, since it would surely take a little time for the wrath of neighbours to subside :)

Perl6 - A step ahead

Got an opportunity to attend Perl Mongers users meet here in bangalore. Because of my friend Subramani, i was there at the meet and it turned out to be a mind boggling session. The meet was about the features of Perl6 that is yet to be released. We reached the meeting a little late and when we reached the meeting has started and the speaker was talking about "pugs". "pugs" stands for Perl6 user golfing system. Looks like Larry Wall wanted perl6 to be a community developed project. Pugs is one of the sucessfull implementations of the specification written by Larry Wall. Pugs is written fully in a language called Haskel. Pugs could produce output in Haskell, perl5 or if you want in Java script so that it can be viewed in browser !

One of the most important feature of Perl6 is that, it supports inline C, python and inline java. It was awesome to see a java code inside a perl program. Yet another feature in perl6 was Hyperoperators which helps in exploiting parallelism. An example of hyperoperators is

[2, 2, 3, 5] >>+<< [4, 4, 3, 1] (result would be [6, 6, 6, 6])

Not only hyperoperators, hypermethods are also available. An example would be like [1, 4, 9, 16] >>. sqrt

One more change in perl6 is that, while loop is no longer used. It is also possible to assign multiple values to variable like $city = "chennai" | "bangalore" and check the variable for any of the values like any <$city> == "chennai". There are a lot other options available with Perl6 but i could not remember a lot that was said in the meeting. The biggest blunder i did was going to the meeting without a scribble pad and pen. Still the meeting was very informative and i am planning to attend more meetings.

With Perl6, it is possible to change the language to match that of the problem. A video in the meet said "it is not reinventing the wheel, but keeping the wheel and reinventing the whole machine". It seemed to be true. Today learnt it is possible to run pug in the browser without download or installation. Check out this site http://feather.perl6.nl:8080/runpugs/

The Perl meeting was the only usefull thing that i did during the weekend. The next post would be on what i did after the meet or perhaps "how to kill time during weekend without much trouble" :).

GNU Emacs on HP UX

After a little bit of struggle with using vi for editing files and then with the installation of Emacs, finally figured out how to install Emacs on a HP UX machine. I started the installation with Emacs-21.4 and then switched over to Emacs-22.1, since i could not find anything about the errors throws while compiling emacs-21.4.

Followed the usual rules of ./configure and make to install but faced hell a lot of problems with that. First ./configure should be run with the option --without-gcc as HP UX does not contain gcc. With that option configure runs to completion without error. The next step is "make" and this is where i ran into lot of problems. First thing is that, in the Makefile inside lib-src directory there is a rule to copy rcs2log, rcs-checkin, vcdiff, grep-changelog from ../ to lib-src. These files are already present in the directory, hence HP make reports an error saying that the files are identical but with gnu make there will not be any problem. So was forced to comment the four rules which copies the files to the directory.

After this is done, i tried to start emacs but got the most common error "Segmentation Fault (core dumped)". Looked like a bug in the emacs source code. Found this link where RMS has discussed this problem. The problem occurs since the uninitialized static pointers. All it required was set the initialize the static pointers to NULL. See this link for more details regarding the solution. So atlast i had the opportunity to correct the Emacs source code :) . Did that and ran "make" and now I have the most powerfull editor in almost all the machines i work.

Visit to Bhara Chukki

After visits to the prominent places in Bangalore like lalbagh, Garuda mall this time we ventured a little outside Bangalore. Was able to kill one day leave with a visit to Bhara Chukki falls near sivasamudra. Sivasamudra is around 120 KM from Bangalore and near a place called Kolegal. Since we chose KSRTC as the mode of transport it took around 3 hours to reach the place. From there once has to travel 7 KM in auto through a rugged road to reach the falls. There are two falls called Bhara Chukki and Gangana Chukki.  "Chukki" looked weird,  later we learnt that Chukki means waterfalls.

The auto are optimistic to the extent that they feel that 20 people can dump into a single auto. Not even a single inch inside the auto is wasted. But the pain is worth taking for you the destiny will be a dip in the cool  waters of river cauvery. Cauvery flows silently amidst the roars of tourists. The water was cool inspite of the hot climate. Since we did not have extra clothes we were not able to enjoy much. After that we returned to bangalore with a bumpy ride in the last seat of the KSRTC trip, with the usual chatting and  teasing.

The best way to go there might be to arrange personal transport and to visit the places like "thalai Kaveri"  and other falls around there.  Though it was a tiring trip it is memorable as it is the first trip outside bangalore.

Backup files in Emacs

This could be useful for novices in Emacs who are yet to hack the Emacs lisp like me. Users of Emacs might be aware of the backup files that are created by emacs when a file is edited.  These backup files are named with ~ following the name. These files could be a nuisance at times. Emacs can be stopped from creating the backup files by adding the following lines in .emacs

(setq make-backup-files nil)

To move the backup files to some other directory the following lines should be added .emacs file.

(setq make-backup-files t)
(make-directory "/tmp/emacsbackup" t)
(setq version-control t)
(setq backup-directory-alist (quote (("." . "/tmp/emacsbackup/"))))

(setq version-control t) will cause different versions of the backup file to be generated. Remove this line if you do not want different version of  file to be generated.

Rocking With Emacs :)

Atlast configured Emacs to play songs also. The only useful thing that myself and subramani did during this weekend might be this. We did that in Subrmani's system, a HP Laptop with Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn installed. Fortunately it had ALSA installed and configured. Yet to check whether OSS was the problem in my system. But  it was good to configure Emacs to play songs and hear songs using Emacs.

For those who are not able to understand anything from this post, Emacs is a powerfull editor in GNU/Linux with a lot of features  that makes it impossible to call it as a editor. Emacs can also be made to play songs using EMMS, Emacs Mulitmedia System.

All it required was to install emms package and other packages like emacs21-el, emacs-extra. Then we need a console media player like mplayer or mpg321. In our case, we had MPlayer installed in the laptop. Then the following lines are to be added in the .emacs file to enable Emacs to play songs,

(require 'emms-setup)
(emms-standard)
(emms-default-players)

There are a lot of options associated with EMMS and with Emacs-Lisp it is possible to fine tune it. But learning Emacs-Lisp still remains as a distant dream. Anyway check out  the EMMS homepage for more information about EMMS. Remember my guru telling me that "With Emacs nothing is possible, the next step with Emacs is making coffee with Emacs".  Who knows in the near future Emacs can do that also.

Outlook -> Thunderbird & Thunderbird -> Outlook

After many filed attempts to configure Thunderbird as the mail client for  M$ exchange server, atlast succeeded in the attempt. Will give a  brief overview of how i configured Thunderbird for MS exchange server. The process was fairly simple all you have to do is

1) Select Incoming server type as POP mail server
2) Dont forget to select "Never" in "Use Secure Connection" column.

These are the two options that need to be taken care, all other options are straight forward. The outgoing SMTP server address should also be given, which might the same as that of incoming server. With these options i was able to configure Thunderbird for M$ exchange server. One problem i encountered while using Thunderbird for M$ exchange server is that i was not able to keep track of calendars and meetings.  Found one good addon for keeping track of meetings and appointments, called as RememberFox. RememberFox is a addon for firefox and thunderbird, that is used to keep track of meetings and  appointment. RememberFox looked really cool to me.

Since i used outlook for one month was unable to keep track of the sent mails, deleted mails etc and finally decided to switch back to M$ Outlook. This is where got stuck with the format clashes. Outlook uses the proprietory .pst format to store mails while thuderbird  uses .mbox format and stores it as a separate file called Inbox. The method was to export the .mbox file into .eml file(which looked more like plain text file with all mail headers) using a tool  called IMAPSize. Then using Outlook express as an intermediate the mails can be exported to Outlook. Check out the IMAPSize home for a detailed description about the process.

My aim was to configure GNUS or Mutt and to use them as my mail clients but still i am not able to do that. Probably should try that  after bringing my system here to my new home.

Fedora 8.1 Testing Released

The alpha or testing edition of Fedora 8 has been released yesterday. It  was interesting to see the screenshots of Fedora 8. Fedora 8 comes with a  lot of features and newly released softwares. If everything  goes well we may be able to enjoy Fedora 8 with KDE4.0, Firefox 3.0 etc etc when the stable  version is released on November 8. Here are few links about Fedora 8.

Screenshots - http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.php?linux_distribution_sm=Fedora%208%20Test%201
Fedora 8 wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/

With the gusty gibbon gearing up to be released, we could expect some healthy competition.

Bad Bad Conductors

Thought not to blog about this, still could not resist. It is about the same old thing that is quite common in banglore buses. If you cant understand anything read this first. Following is my experience with the conductors in BMTC buses.

First trip: Was going from my home along with my friend to my office. Cost of the ticket was Rs.5. Gave ten rupees and asked for two tickets, as usual the conductor gave two rupees as commission. This time i asked for the ticket and the conductor politely took back the two rupee commission and gave back the ticket.

Second trip: This time it was from my office to home. Gave 10 rupees and asked for two tickets. As usual got two rupees as commission. I asked for the ticket. The conductor thought i was trying to strike a deal and added one more rupee to the commission !!!. I refused and conductor gave a disgusting look as though i am trying to take away his hard earned money. Finally got back the ticket.

Third trip: It happened today morning. As usual gave 10 rupees for two tickets. The conductor searched for two rupees. Alas ! he could not find the change. Wondering what he did ? Gave two nine rupees tickets, that he has managed to preserve for days and walked away. Still he looked a little sad that he had to give those tickets to us. Dont know how old the tickets were. Some passenger had given the ticket to the conductor to show the amount and get back the change written on the back of the ticket and this conductor found good use for that.

Heard that this practice is in existence for a very long time. Someone told me that even Tamil super star, Rajnikanth has done this when he started his career as a conductor.

Deathly Hallows At last

At last completed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Thanks to my friend Praveen for lending me his  book. As usual devoted one whole night for the book. Though "Deathly Hallows" was the most awaited book of the Harry Potter series, i could not quite allocate time to read the book quicky. I took more than a week to finish the book.  Anyway finally completed one of the greatest work of JKR.

"Deathly Hallow" was a little slugish in the begining. But after around 300 pages, the plot thickens and what follows is a hard core agical adventure, potrayed in JKR's style. The fan fiction books and fan's predictions before the book was released, did spoil the thrill and suspense a bit. Pottermaniacs active in the web, have predicted almost every possible way the plot of "Deathly Hallow" can be written. When i first read "Chamber of secrets" i had no clue about harry potter and the plot made me an ardent fan of Harry Potter. I read Deathly Hallows after reading a fake book, lot of reviews & plot spoilers and after seeing the ending in news channel. If not for JKR's style i would have felt little boring.

I felt more like looking through the pensieve into Harry Potter memories than reading the book. So engrossed in the plot that it was difficult to push aside the deaths of characters in the book.  Could not count how many characters JKR managed to murder in the final book but it was purely a blood bath, like she mentioned in the interviews. One good thing about the book is that JKR has tried to focus on all the characters in the book and has succeeded to a greater extent. Justification about Snape's activities and his love story was heart touching. If JKR has wished the book could have been made a little smaller. But these things dont really affect Harry Potter fans.

When i finished the book at 3.30 in the night, could not believe that  have come to the end of one of the most interesting series. Don't know why but the book aroused all hidden sentiments. The end of the book was not that important, because whether harry potter is alive or not, there is not going to be one more book about the boy wizard. Though Rowling has suggested that she might continue with the series, it was evident from the story line that there is very little probablity of her doing it. Though JKR has put an end to Harry Potter, hope harry potter continues to live on.

Winscp: Transfer with ease

Winscp, is a FTP, SFTP and SCP client for windows. It reduces the pain of transferring file and folders between windows and GNU/Linux to a greater extent. There are a lot of ways of transferring files and folders in GNU/Linux and Windows but to transfer file between a windows machine and GNU/Linux machine the only option i knew was FTP. Since FTP does not support directory structures, it was really painful to compress the directories as single file and transferring them and uncompressing them in the destination. Winscp seems to make the job a lot easier. It provides a secure and easy way to transfer file between and windows and GNU/Linux machines. For more information about winscp and to download winscp,check out Winscp's home page at http://winscp.net. The windows installer is just 1.8MB. The most
interesting feature about winscp is that it is released under GPL and is a free software.

Emacs: goto

How to go to a specified line in Emacs. Though i had this doubt for a very long time i never searched for it. Today got the answer when i was searching for some GDB stuffs. Anyway here it is. Add the following two lines in .emacs and restart emacs.

(global-unset-key [?\M-1])
(global-set-key [?\M-l] 'goto-line)

Now pressing Alt+1 or Esc+1 will prompt for the line to jump. Don't know whether there is anyother way but this is the first way i found.

A bad game

The whole indian cricket team will be in cloud nine after winning the test match against England comfortably. It was an occassion where the senior batsmen and bowlers showed their potential and helped India register a convincing win over England. This post is not about how they played but it was about something that happened during the match. England did better with the ball and with the mouth. I got the opportunity to see about one hour of India's first innings and i  happened to see Zaheer Khan giving a warning to Kevin Pieterson with his bat.  Probably England thought it was the last resort to win the game. If it was Navjot singh sidhu, he might have broken some English heads.

Sledging has long roots in the game of cricket. Its the one of the mighty tools used by Australia to get the wicket. I had the opinion  that Australia is the team best in sledging untill i saw some clips in Star sports. A lot of team seem to be enjoy sledging. Those clips showed  Flintoff and Sangakara sucessfully distracting the attention of the  batsmen and getting them out. Indians are winners in this regard. they  rarely involve in sledging. Santhakumaran Srisanth tried a bit but never sucessfull in that.

Cricket is called as gentlemen game but sledging makes it look bad.  Hope ICC comes up with some good rules or suggestion to reduce that.  The best thing would be players acting like real genttlemen. Comments  are required, but the nature of comment should be take care. But for viewers sitting in front or television, sledging gives something to munch for a while.

A difficult calculation

Set theory, Algebra, Modern Algebra, Geometry, Analytical Geometry, Trigonometry, Differential Calculus, Integral Calculus, Differential equation, Partial differential equation, Numerical Methods, Complex Numbers, Operation Research, Graph Theory, Statistics. Those were some of the difficult mathematical subjects that i studied during my college and in school. They involved a little amount of calculation and were quite easy. The most difficult calculation i encountered after entering the company was calculation and declaration of income tax. Was forced to spend two full days on this, since could not make head or tail about the process and rules. Later with the help of some senior colleagues in company was able to decipher but still i am not sure about the entire process. It was funny to find even seniors sharing the same opinion. So the tamil proverb "Aetu surakai kariku uthavathu"(book knowledge does not help much in life) seems to be true.

Harrysteria...

Two weeks after the release of the movie and about a week after the release of the book, the situation has not changed and harry potter continues to find a place in the newspapers. Whatever Daniel Radcliffe blabbers is a news. The seventh and the final book created a lot of eagerness even among the muggles, who have not read the previous six books. Thanks to the media for creating so much of hype. I think the media has overdone it. There was a lot of fight among the news channels to disclose the plot of the book. Finally a news channel disclosed the plot as a "Flash News". Though most of the potter maniacs got the book on the first day there are some like me who are yet to read the book. I never expected them to disclose whether Harry will die or not. Even after reading a lot of plot spoilers in the web, the expectations are still high and i still have lot of faith in J.K.R. Waiting for my friend to finish off the book today, after which two to three nights will be dedicated to "Harry potter and the Deathly Hallows".

Idli - the idle food

Bangalore is bringing a lot of change in me. The most affected among them is the eating habit. Three weeks back "idli" was never in the list of favourties for breakfast. After experimenting with different types of dosas here "idli" looks like the best possible breakfast item. Though Poori looks like a great option, the sidedish is nearly horrible. Found a lot of people with the same experience and idea.  Here is a list of points supporting the latest favorite item.

1) It does not contain oil.
2) Easy to digest.
3) As long as the chutney is eatable, idli can be eaten
4) Takes less time to prepare, so waiting time in hotel is less
5) Finally, as far as my experience holds, it is difficult to make a bad bad
idli when compared to other items.

A lot of changes in a short period.

Funny Facts

Two weeks in bangalore, learnt a lot about the city. Discovered a new sweet called "Sambar". It is the same sambar that we use as a side dish for idly, dosa etc. In many hotels here sambar is a lot sweeter than many other sweets. Same thing happens with "rasam" also. Grrr... Unfortunately after coming to bangalore, Idly happens to be  the favorite for breakfast. Thats about the food.

Traveling in bus gives a lot of experience. The following incident happened while we were returning home from office. We gave twenty five rupees and asked for three tickets. The conductor gave back seven rupees but not the ticket. We chased the conductor for ticket  but all we got was some weird signs from the conductor. Later with the help of passengers in bus we realised that the cost of a ticket was Rs.7 and actually he has given us a commission of three rupees :) There are some good conductors who really stick to the rules but many are like this. Bad Bad conductors, not of electricity but of character. Not only the conductors, most of the business man can identify that we are not native of this city and usually increase the cost to 150%or even  200% of the original cost. Other than things like this bangalore is really cool place and looks like a good place to live.

Coooool

That is the most famous dialogue from the latest superhit Shivaji that is breaking records. The film saw three great men joining hands Superstar, shivaji and ARR. But after seeing the film realised that it is purely a Rajnikanth's film. When there is much logic in Shankar's previous film, searching for logistics in shivaji will not give good results. Wait this is just one view of the movie. For a hard core Rajni fan, the movie is a great treat as it is filled with his style. The style that has given Rajni all this fame makes the film more interesting.

Though Rajni dominates the entire movie, there are some places where u feel the presence of Shankar and ARR. ARR has done a really beautiful job with the background music. In songs u will find the touch of our Shankar.  As usual he continues to spend a lot of money in the songs. It would be unfair to end this without commenting about Shriya. Shriya has gained a lot of popularity from the movie. She has ample to show and has used every opportunity to show it all. Dont forget it is the talent i am talking about now.

Overall the movie reminds about Rajni's movies of late eighties. Though the movie is long and runs for 3.15 hours time flies by.  Rajni looks a lot younger and i got a feeling like he can act for another thirty years with this sort of makeup. Since it is getting late i stop here. To end shivaji is a great movie. No wonder it is breaking records.

First Post From Bangalore...

Atlast i found a system and some time to blog. After a week in bangalore, i think i have learnt a very little about bangalore. The most enchanting thing about the city is the climate. The climate here is cool like in kodaikanal. Being the heart of IT in India, the cost of living in bangalore is little high. Though the bus boards are written in native language it is possible to move around with the help of local people. A large percentage of the population here in bangalore are capable of talking and understanding three different languages like hindi, kannada and tamil. There are some hotels where it is possible to get south indian food or to be specific tamil nadu food. Bangalore as such seems to be a small city still the traffic jams increase the time of journey by a large factor. Bangalore as a whole looks like a great place to live, still my heart hovers around my home and i am waiting for every opportunity to visit Madurai.

Bidding adieu to Madurai

Just a day more before i leave madurai to join my company in bangalore. Twenty one years in madurai has created a lot of love for the city. Ten days visit to chennai during the second year of college increased it a bit. Madurai looked like the ideal place to live. Most of them might not agree with this, but Madurai is more beautiful from one perspective. It is the city that never sleeps. Cant say that the climate is perfect here. Cant say there are many places to visit here in madurai. Still Madurai is better and more beautiful than most of the cities here in TamilNadu. Unique feature of Madurai is that there is always a hotel to  fill your tummy and it is possible to reach all places in Madurai through bus even during midnight. And Madurai is one place where you can find people speaking good tamil. May be this a one side view of Madurai, but found most of them sharing the same view. Will be missing Madurai a lot, the place where i spent the most beautiful part of my life :(

Great Expectations...

Just two days more before Rajnikanth film "Shivaji" will hit the screens. Already there is a lot of hype about the movie and any small news about the movie is invited with a lot of enthusiasm by the fans.In his last film Chandramukhi Rajnikanth became the highest paid actor in Asia surpassing jackie chan. This time shivaji is getting released in around 5000 theaters around the world and the count is larger than that of casino royale and heard that it is world record.  There was a huge welcome for even the trailer. The trailer looked pretty good. Rajnikanth looked a lot younger with new hair style. From the trailer it was clear that the film will be full of superstar's style and punch dialogues. A.R. Rahman's music is already a hit. "Shivaji" might be a great hit for Rajnikanth, as the craze for him has not died a bit. Anyway in two days the result would be known and i am waiting for my opportunity to see the movie.

First Successful Kernel Compilation

During the past four years in college made many unsuccessful attempts in compiling the Linux kernel. May be i did not make any serious attempts till now. Anyway at last compiled the Linux kernel successfully today. A server in college was fitted with QLA2312 fibre optic card and the kernel being old did not have the driver. So we started with the job of compiling the latest linux kernel 2.6.21.3 and it helped in finding where i went wrong during the past. I have seen seniors compiling kernel without initrd or initial RAM disk. So i was trying to do the same. initrd is not required as long as the kernel contains support for the hard disk and other devices inbuilt and not as a module. This time we tried with creating initrd, and we were successful. Still the task of compiling the kernel without creating initrd, remains. That would be the next task.

The Fake One

Successfully completed the fake "HarryPotter and the deathly hallows" at the cost of one night sleep. Had the book even before the news about the book occupied the front pages of newspapers. First, read around two hundred pages and was convinced that it was fake as it deviated 100% from JKR's ways. Since the holidays were moving a lot slower decided to give it a try once again and finally completed few days back. Though i am sure it would be nowhere near the original work of JKR, it can called a reasonably good attempt. There was more of snogging, shagging and other stuffs and a little of story here and there. Looked like the story was developed from reviews and predictions of readers of the previous six books. Lacked foreshadowing, which has been the greatest tool of JKR in attracting the readers. Still it is a good attempt and hope the story of the real harry potter does not match with that of the fake one which most of the HP fans have already managed to read. The recent news is that there are still fifty more pages to be added to the already voluminous 659 pages of the fake one.

Walking down the memory lane

Was involved in the process of cleaning my room and found eight hall tickets, two hidden internal mark sheets, numerous test and assignment notes that made me nostalgic and took me back to the college days. Though the college life has ended, the memories continue to haunt. The four years gave different experiences, some good some bitter. Put together they look beautiful. Past looks beautiful as long as you enjoy the present. Here is a brief account of my four years in college.

First Year : During the first semester i was a sincere student and did nothing other than studying, writing assignments, doing maths tutorial etc etc. Got GPA of 9.0, the highest in my college life. During the EDC  class in second semester, got back the old habit of talking and singing. The guy responsible for this happens to be my friend sriram. During the first year i never missed A5 or B14 (buses).

Second Year : Became a member of the team maintaining TCENet, college intra net portal. Got the opportunity to meet a number of seniors. The seniors together formed a formidable team. Had a great time with them and learnt a lot from them too. It was there i got introduced to GNU/Linux, FOSS and mailing lists. Went to virtusa as a part of internship program, came back and contributed very little to the project AAOSK offered by team virtusa. Attended GLUGOT meetings, started studying PHP and started a small project called openquiz. Played a small role in organizing FStival'04, the software freedom  celebrations in college.

Third Year : CAS and Cyber 05 are the two notable things during the third year. Designed the web portal for Cyber 05. Cyber 05 gave a lot of experiences, some good, some bitter and both are fresh in
memory. Started the project Centralized Authentication System for the college. Parallel processing lab became a second home as night labs forced me to stay in lab most of the time. Successfully finished and launched CAS. Along with seniors organized FStival'05. Had a great time with the finalyear students. Switched over to B5, the last bus to college.

Final year : Placed in TCS and then in HP. In between had Honeywell interview where i managed to gather a bit of courage to argue with the interviewer. During the seventh semester, contributed to the redesigning of college website. Along with the third years organized FStival'06. During the final semester there was abrupt change in my character and found it very difficult to listen to classes. Spent time in class listening to stories of my friend vanni or sleeping peacefully. Spent most of the afternoon or project time in pump house. Left the habit of writing assignments on own and studying for internals. Started missing B5 and came five, ten or fifteen minutes late to college. Saw a lot of movies. Final year gave opportunities or enjoyment which i think i utilized well.

Dtracing to kill time

After a nice weekend with much shopping and roaming around main places of pune, i was virtually locked in my sister's home on monday without much to do. If not for the computer i would have found it difficult to kill time. Tested the opensolaris starter's kit and tried a bit of Dtrace. Though i dont know how to write even a single line of Dtrace script, the Dtrace toolkit in Belenix provided me a option. No wonder why there is a lot of rustle about Dtrace. Dtrace is awesome. Found the following script to be interesting. The script finds the total number of system calls made by each process.

dtrace -n 'syscall:::entry { @num[execname] = count(); }'

Found that init was making 61 system calls, fam made 4251, dtrace 7948 and xfce-panel process made 27163 system calls in a span of pproximately five minutes. Thought of installing opensolaris express but since the installer required around 704MB RAM, silently  removed the CD and sealed it for future use. Finally my mind drifted to gaming and started playing super tux in Belenix. Sometime later found Harrypotter and Warcraft games in windoze and from then haven't touched those Solaris DVDs at all. Dtrace is like a drug, it takes you to a different world and it is difficult to stay away from it for a long time.  Dont know when i will be Dtracing again but will surely do.

Post from pune

When half of my classmates are attending TCS training, i am chilling out myself in my sister's home in pune. It was a tough decision to take, but finally decided to bite the bullet. Anyway now i am here in pune enjoying my final holidays of student life. I was almost like a half roasted chicken after the two day journey in train. Pune felt like heaven when i finally got out of the train. The climate in pune is a lot cooler and it is a different summer i am experiencing here. Sun sets here only at 7:30pm. The markets are active only during the evening and there are very few shops in the morning. There are very few traffic signals and i rarely see traffic police even in the busiest roads. It is difficult to manage here without knowing Hindi. The hindi that i studied for three years in TVSLMHSS is helping a little and i am learning a lot of hindi. Still to visit a lot of  places, expecting this weekend to be busy.

Letting the luck decide

1568 in Maths, around 150 in physics and 150 in chemistry. Thats the number of centum holders in the subjects in +2. Total pass percentage is around 81. The first three marks with Tamil as first language are 1182, 1180 and 1179.With other languages it is 1190/1200.  All this is great but what follows this may not be. The selection process for Engineering seats seems to be laborious and old fashioned pushing aside the importance of marks and bringing in the other factors. From  what i heard, the engineering and medical ranks are decided based on the aggregate of Maths, Physics and chemistry and biology. If the aggregate is same then rank is based on individual marks in Maths, Physics and chemistry in order. If still there is a tie then choice of first language and marks in Tamil come into picture. If tie still exists then the seniority or DOB is used to break the tie. It the tie is still unbreakable then ranks is decided using lots. So it is like lottery where lucky ones get the seat.

So getting marks alone may not be sufficient to get Engineering seat or medical seat. Students need to have a lot of luck. Thousands may be getting the same aggregate for sure and luck will have a greater role this time. Happy that i did +2 before four years and i got last Computer Science seat in TCE by mere 0.01 difference. Thanks to the Common Entrance test we had, as engineering seat allocation was not by chance but by marks then. Abolishment of CET has done nothing to improve the situation but has successfully worsen it to a greater extent.

Opensolaris starter Kit

Yesterday got a fully sealed pack with US seals and custom verifications etc. It was none other than the Opensolaris starter kit. The kit contained two DVDs, the first one contains several live solaris distributions and the second one the solaris express. All that is fine but while ordering i forgot two things about my system and opensolaris. One is that my system still doesnot have a DVD reader and solaris does not run in 128MB RAM. So sealed the pack again and left it for future use. After Ananth's session on DTrace and ZFS i was eager to test them. But i would be stress testing my system if i try installing or running any distribution of solaris. Waiting for the first month salary to upgrade my system. Till then no other go should continue with the existing system. Grrrrrrrr....

Morons with power

"As an individual you can do something to the society, as a politician you can do anything". This was a comment made by one of my juniors in the group discussion session during Placement training. It happens to be 100% true. Past two days in Madurai has been a little tensed due the violence that started because of a stupid poll. The tamil daily dinakaran started a poll to find who will be karunanidhi's political heir. Dinakaran has being doing useless job like this for a long time. 70% voted for stalin it seems and only 2% for CM's elder son Azhagiri. This sparked a lot of violence and funny fact is that it was
headed by mayor of madurai. Finally the violence became uncontrollable, as police did not take any steps to control it and ended with the death of three Dinakaran employees.

What followed this incident is something unacceptable. Police made fake arrests still leaving the one who is reponsible. Cable TV operators were afraid of transmitting, as it would spread news. People never seemed to mind what is happening and were thankful that they were spared. This makes my conclusion valid. My conclusion is that politicians = fools with power, police = mindless morons, TN people = 100% ignorant. Politics will continue to remain as a garbage as long as educated stay away from it.

Now i am an engineer...

This post is totally irrelavant to those who do not know me.

Now i can proudly add the two letter B.E. to the end of my name. Successfully completed bachelor of engineering and now i am one among the engineers of India. Results were announced yesterday (7th may) when none of us were expecting it. But it did not do any harm. After three semesters of same mark 8.29 it was good to get something more than that. This time GPA was 8.53.

It is interesting to see the GPA and CGPA curve. The GPA started with reasonably good mark in first semester, 9.0. After that it turned out to be a monotonically decreasing sequence with GPAs 8.97, 8.86, 8.57, 8.29, 8.29, 8.29. Atlast in the final semester it is 8.53. The CGPA curve looks more like a straight line with negative slope. Anyway now its all over and its an happy ending to the college life.

Trip to kodaikanal

Will try to keep this post small and simple. Went to kodaikanal, the nearest hill station to Madurai. The three days trip was filled with fun. This turns out to be my fourth visit to Kodaikanal and kodai is no longer a strange place. Nothing has changed in Kodaikanal. Though the first day was little hot, the second day turned out to be like what we expected. The second day was a lot cooler and the cool breeze increased the delight. We were walking through the mist in places shanthi valley view and guna caves.

As usual the nights went faster as we engaged ourselves in cards. It was the usual Ace game with little difference. The difference is that the person who manages to lose four consecutive games and collect all the four aces should take bath in the ice cool water in the middle of Kodai night. One of our friend successfully achieved the feat and took bath in the middle of the night. We had an oppurtunity to see sai baba who was on kodai. We managed to catch a glimpse of the bisons during the return journey. Nothing has changed in Kodai. It is the same old hill station with really inviting climatic conditions and places that offer stupendous view of the valley below. Managed to take lot of photos but yet to upload them in picasa .

An early visit to the exhibition

We went to the Madurai exhibtion last week. As hostel friends would be leaving home early we planned an early visit and ended up seeing how the shops are built. The exhibition looked a lot different with very little crowd and very few shops. It was a different experience.  As there were very few shops and entertainment aspects we were walking around the whole ground chatting and at times peeking into the shops. Usually the policemen, with the thought of being more vigilant and people friendly are usually hard on college students moving around as a group. This time it did not happen.  We ended up visiting stalls put up by the police department, wildlife department, fisheries, IT department, Madurai corporation. The stalls were informative and were the only place where one could spend some time. One interesting information is that, the road from thiruparankundram C2 police station (TCE college stop) to Thiruparankundram stands second in the road list where more number of accidents happen. Surely, it was not the right time to visit madurai exhibition but its a different exhibition i have seen. Soon it would reach its peak and would demand one more visit. Think that visit would be a lot different.

Disappointing World cup

Inzi retires from ODI after the worst run in world cup. Bob woolmer died under suspicious conditions. Younis Khan declines the offer for captaincy. The batting legend Lara retires from ODI. England coach Duncan Fletcher's term ends and ECB is not in a mood to continue his contract. West Indies coach Bennet King resigns. Above all this Stephen Fleming steps down from the position of New Zealand ODI captain after loss in the semi final. There is only one team whose members are undettered by the early exit from world cup. Except for few angry exchange of words, nothing has happened. Yes, I am talking about the mighty team india. Dravid is the only captain with fighting spirit. Despite the shameful exit from world cup, Dravid is still fighting for endorsements. Hats off to him.

On the whole this world cup turned out to be a disappointing one for me. No team played to its capablity. No team in the super eight was competent enough to face Australia. The result of the super eight matches were easily predicable (except for the one between bangladesh and south africa). The condition would have been different if India and Pakistan had qualified for the super eight. With just the final remaining there is no use in talking about this. Though i hate both the lankans and aussies, i would be supporting the aussies in this final.

Spectacular Show

Twelve suryakirans, the front line aerobatics team of IAF (Indian Air Force) were here in Madurai for the first time and left the people mesmerized with the skills they exhibited here on Wednesday. Suryakiran is one among the three teams in the world who are capable of flying nine flight formation.  The other two being to Royal air force and Canadian air force. They left the Madurai people awestruck with their acumen and precision.

The decision to go to the show was taken in the morning and after going to college found that 90% of the final year students have taken the same decision. Later that evening we realized that reaching the destination is going to be a herculean task as about 75% of the Madurai population were heading for the same location. The fifty buses organized by Madurai corporation were not at all enough. A little away from the location traffic came to a halt. We were left with no option other than relying on our feet to reach the destination.  We were forced to run a half marathon in the road packed with vehicles.

We reached the location just in time to see the Mi-8 helicopter leaving the crowd after showering flowers. Then began the spectacular show. The six suryakirans started exhibiting their skills.  The twenty minutes show started with the phoenix formation and continued with rising sun formation,rays of sun, dives, barrel rolls etc etc. The crowd erupted when two suryakirans created the heart symbol in skies.

The pilots manoeuvred the flight through the open skies with great precision and speed. The return journey was more difficult. There was no space to walk on the road and as usual autos and two wheelers were taking pleasure in blocking the way. At last we reached the bus stop walking through dust and dirt and when we came out, we were stinky with smell of sweat. Later i had to take bath in the middle of night to get back to normal. I should consider myself lucky as there were some who came all the way from the other end of Madurai just to know that the show has ended. Anyway the pain was worth taking, as it was a spectacular show by the fearless falcons of the Indian air force.

Unnale Unnale

A post about a tamil movie after a long time. Unnale Unnale happens to be the fourth movie i have seen in theatre this year after Guru, PKMS and Mozhi. The film had a lot of expectations bcoz of the super hit songs and director Jeeva's fame. Should say the film lived up to its expectations. Like his previous film Ullam Ketkume this film also targets the youth. The story is all about love and how possessiveness of gals affects love.

The hero vinay is a fun loving freak who loves to enjoy every moment in life. Opposite to his character is the heroine sada is a lot possessive and wants his lover to do what she wants.  Unfortunately both of them happen to be lovers and their characters sparks a lot of fight between them. Actually the story starts with the split up between sada and vinay. Then you have a little flash back about what happened between sada and vinay. What happens between vinay, sada and tanisha forms the rest of the story.

Not much in the story but Jeeva handles it story  meticulously. Dialogues being simple and straight is a major plus oint in the movie. You could see traces of madhavan in some of vinay's actions and smile. In fact vinay looks a bit like young madhavan. Sada and Tanisha do their job perfectly. Picturisation of songs too good. Overall it a great movie but half of the lot have other opinions about the movie. Some said the movie is only for lovers but it was interesting to guys like me also.

Cant wait till july 21 (Not for muggles)

July 21, the day half of the world may be waiting for. The day when the final masterpiece of JKR, Harry potter and the Deathly hallows would be released worldwide. That contains the solution to most of the questions purposivley left unanswered in the sixth book, Harry potter and the half blood prince and is expected to be the most interesting among the seven. No wonder JKR is a great story teller. She has handled the plot so well and it has left the whole fan community speculating about the story line of the seventh book. Many had come with wonderful theories about the seventh book with excerpts from previous books supporting their theories. Most of them feel that Regulus Black is R.A.B., Half of the fans are convinced that dumbledore is not dead and feel snape killing dumbledore is just a drama staged by dumbledore and snape but JKR interview's suggest something different. Finally there are hard proof theories claiming harry to be the seventh horcrux. These speculations are quite interesting to read indeed.

The answers would become apparent once the book is released. With expectations building i am set to read the six books again before the final one is released. Though there are a lot of speculations about the final book it would be interesting to see how it has been handled by JKR. The only thing i hate in that book would be the death of main characters. Should wait to see what happens.

Doing it simple

Was chatting with one of my friends sometime back. We were talking about reducing the size of the pictures taken using our digital camera for uploading in web. Though he has GNU/Linux installed in his system he sticks on to windows for doing most of his job. He had been using the paint program to reduce the image size. I had been doing it using GNU/Linux and it looks pretty simple. So thought of blogging about it. Came across this utility called "convert" a longtime back when i was trying to use my own grub splash image. This site http://jaeger.morpheus.net/linux/grubsplash.html contains a lot of information about creating your own grub splash images using convert. Follow the link to know how to create your own grub splash images.

Convert comes as a part of Imagemagick package that provides a set of command line utilities to create, edit and convert images. Convert is a utility that can be used to perform a number of operations like changing the resolution, changing the colour scheme, changing the format of picture etc etc. Convert has made the job a lot easier. The man pages will give more information i suppose. It was this tool i use to reduce the size of the images. To make the job much more easier wrote a simple python script which when supplied the source image directory and destination image directory as arguments, uses "convert" to convert the all the images in the source directory to the required form and stores it in the destination directory. The script can be found here. Convert proves to be a really handy tool indeed.

Google Papers

This is about the latest news from and about google but a little late also. If you know about this you know what to do. Google after establishing its supremacy in the email world with gmail has turned its attention towards postal mails. Google has started a new service called google papers. Google will send hard copies of the mails you want and will let you keep the paper copy of the mails apart from the electronic mail stored in its server. That means you can get hard copy of the emails your girl friend sent you and read it again and again whenever you want. Check out this page to know more about the Google Paper.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/index.html

If you feel elated and impressed with this, i request you to take a look into the comments. This post is incomplete without the comments.

Totally disgusting...

This is something about indian politics or to be specific tamil nadu politics. Supreme court announced its decision to stay the 27% reservation in IITs and IIMs few days back. This post is not about the decision. One could talk about whether quota is needed or not for days. Actually i have done that many times usually with my friends who have different opinion about the issue. My personal opinion is that quotas are barrier to the development of the country. This post is about what happened after that.

Once the decision was announced, the tamilnadu government announced a one day strike on the pretext of reflecting the view of the people. It looks more like an individual decision than that of people. It was a decision taken hastily by the politicians just to maintain their status.  They could take the credit for disturbing almost everyone in the state. When it comes to disturbing people, the parties forget the differences and work together. Like when the government decided to cancel the Common Entrance Test, the only exam that tested 0.0001% of the intelligence in students all the political parties joined together and abolished it. When something good is proposed they find various flaws and put the plan to sleep. Everything works according the wish of the politicians and they work for the votes and not for the people. Democracy has taken a new meaning. Democracy is by the politicians, for the politicians and of the politicians.

LaTex - The mighty typesetter

The documentation work for our final year project came to and today. It turned out to be one of the most boring jobs ever performed. The only interesting part of the documentation process was LaTeX. Exploring LaTeX provided more fun than expected. Should say LaTeX made the job more easier. We started learning LaTeX long time back and were using it for small documents that hardly exceeded ten pages. This is the first time we are using it for full fledged documentation. Still there is a lot to be explored and  found in LaTeX. The next step would be to create my resume using LaTeX.  In btw, i was eager to know the list of bullets available in LaTeX and created this file which contains the list of bullets available in LaTeX.

Team India Thrashed

Sehwag is a waste.
Dravid unfit to captaincy, Sachin to quit, Sehwag to be packed and
coach to be sacked.
Sehwag needs to play against some school teams to gain confidence.
Sehwag should be transferred to Bermuda or Netherlands to avoid incurring
his return fare from WI.
Some airlines should give complimentary ticket to sehwag for returning home.
Indian team can do better in modelling than in cricket.
India will bring the cup..oh yaar! i mean Indian team members will bring
back the coffee cups.
An unnecessary luggage in Caribbean. Pack sehwag and sachin.
All the best dravid, Hope u lose the match against Bermuda and return
home soon.

Wondering what they are. They are some funny comments by the made by "supporters of Indian cricket team" for the question whether sehwag deserves a place in the team posted by a news channel. Hopes were running high before the match started. Everyone was expecting India to win the match easily without any trouble and were hopeful of India breaking some records or so. But it turned out to be a embarrassing and humiliating defeat in the hands of Bangladesh who were considered as underdogs. It was painful to see the way the team played. There was no aggression at all. Probably Ganguly felt pity for the ball and decided not to hit balls. Looked like Indian team felt that singles and twos are  the only way to get runs as there were only five boundaries during the first fifteen overs. Overall it was a worst performance. In a country where cricket is a religion and cricketers are demigods performance like this is a shame. When half of the country is in front of the  tv in the middle of the night expecting something good to happen, nothing happened for India. The men in blue have left the hopes of the billion fall into ruins once again :( ....

The Final year Effect

Just a week to go before the final year ends and we become alumni of the college. It is interesting to look back what happened during the final year. After entering the final semester the entire attitude turned topsy-turvy.. There was not even a single class i listened as there was lot to be discussed among friends. The brain was not willing to store the submission dates and writing assignments without copying looked like a sin. Till the seventh semester there was only one place in college where i could be found and it happened to be the lab. After entering the final sem i was there at some place in college like opposite to the bank, library ditch, annan kadai, ground but not in lab. A deep sleep in the pump house during the afternoon from 1:30 to 3:30 became unresistable. Canteen became the most frequented place and staying there for 1 to 1 and 1/2 hours with just a single cup of coffee became a usual practice. Even pairs in college did not stay that long in canteen. It was only after the official college working hours we did some useful work for project. Taking the book and reading something turned out to be mission impossible even on the day before the internals. The only difficult part of the internals was spending 1 and 1/2 hours inside the class thinking about what can be written. Just few more days to go before the college life comes to an end. Would be funny to see everyone attaching the word "last" to every day and everything that happens the next week. A lot happened during the four years and lot learnt. Everything comes to an end in the journey of life filled with twists and turns. Life as a student ends in few days but the golden memories would linger in the mind for a long time. Hope the last week turns out to be a memorable one.

OSXlook for Debian

Stumbled upon this link http://www.taimila.com/ubuntuosx.php in the ilugc mailing list. That site describes about how to make ubuntu look like Mac OS. Suggests a few themes which will give the feel of Mac to your desktop and the steps to be followed. Followed the steps there and made my GNOME desktop look something similar to the Mac desktop. But the T-ish theme suggested by that link was not so impressive in Debian. Later came across a theme called MacOS-X in gnome-look.org. A cool theme that makes your desktop look exactly similar to that of the Mac desktop. Installed the theme and the icon set suggested in the theme download page. Everything is perfect except for the bottom panel that needs to be configured like the OSX docker. Except for that the desktop looks exactly like the mac one and is pretty cool..

Something about vista...

Though vista was released few weeks back there is very little noise about it in this part of the state. I am yet to catch a glimpse of the operating system. Not many are talking about vista here and still college has not purchased one i think. Except for the reviews posted by some users in the internet, nothing is known about its performance. Some called vista a memory bloat and it requires around 2 GB of memory for good performance. A post in slashdot claimed vista suffers from serious UAC bugs. Heard that vista has failed to clear some antivirus security certificate the name of which i dont remember, so it may still require a third party antivirus to protect it. Looks like what i have read till now seems to be against the operating system.

M$ is heavily advertising the operating system and the advertisement in tv focusses mainly on the GUI aspects. Looks like the cafe coffee day shop has gone into some sort of agreement with M$. Their menu card is designed with windows logo and looks more like a vista advertisement card than a menu card. You will have to open the windows logo to get the list of items. There is also a new cool drink named after vista. Dont remember the name now but it went on like "windows wow ...." and costs around Rs.50. Cafe coffee day created some noise before by using gnu/linux for their billing system. Now they are doing it with vista.Should wait to see how far these advertisements are effective. After entry into the college windows has not attracted me at all and still it continues to be the same.

Visit to god's own country

After the spicy trip to trivandrum last year this time we were off to kerala once again for the final year industrial visit. This time it was cochin, the queen of the arabian sea. The trip turned out to be a thrilling experience. As usual we started late from the college and  reached cochin late. Cochin is a beautiful city with wide roads and the buildings illustrated the architectural excellence of the people. After the short stay at the room it was time to visit TCS. In the evening we went to the cochin harbour and it was great to see large ships moving in and out of the port. We spent around one hour there watching the various war ships of Indian navy. The guide also pointed us to the war ship that destroyed the karachi port. Managed to take a lot of snaps there. After dinner it was time for some game play. We started playing cards at around 9 pm and kept going till 4 am. We were playing the game of ass and it was quite interesting. Subramani and Musi took turns and lost the game 6 and 5 times respectively. They were closely followed by prabakaran with 4 and nirmal with 3. I lost the pen ultimate game ending the successfull run of 18 games withoug loses. Ramji remained undefeated that night but lost many times the next day. This game of cards turned out to be the most interesting part of the IV.

The next day we were off to Athirapally falls where the film "Punnagai Mannan" was shot. The view of the falls was splendid and it was interesting to see that the area has escaped from the human beings as it was clean and well maintained. We spent the whole day there enjoying the beauty of the falls and the cool breeze. Finally we departed from cochin and returned to madurai. The return journey in the bus was dramatic, thrilling and funny. Though we spent a lot of time in bus than in visiting places, lot of funny incidents would  linger in mind for a lot many days to come. Will upload the photos soon, keep in touch with http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/sens2003.

Guru

Not much to comment. Guru turned out to be a great movie where brilliance of both Maniratnam and Abishek reached the pinnacle. we went there for the night show of the first day with the sponsor being senior senthilkumaran. Maniratnam's fame had brought in a large crowd and we were able to get the ticket as we went there before one hour. Guru lived up to our hopes. The story takes you back by around 40 years and is about the ordeals of a businessman with great dreams. Though songs come with the best blend of ARR and Vairamuthu not all songs please our ears. A tamil movie with the same story and tamil hero and heroine would be a sure hit. Overall the movie is a little fast paced and looks like a competitor for the top slots.

The Second Expedition

This time we were off to alagarkovil a hill resort which derives a lot of historical significance from Kalazhagar temple and Palamudhirchozhai temple of Lord Muruga. It was the usual 6 with the additions being Shanoof and two guys from Information Technology department, Sukumar and Seenivasan. This time the trip was not as  interesting and difficult as the previous one to TPK hills. Our intention was to keep away from the normal path as far as possible but we were forced to stick on to the original path. The reason being almost all reachable parts were polluted and the smell emanating was little more than nauseating. Alagarkovil has turned into a perfect example of a place where man has used his full power to pollute to the greatest extent possible. We still managed to explore the places that have escaped from humans and look a little better. This time i had the camera with me and we managed to take a lot of pictures. The walk to the top of the hill turned out to be a long one as we almost stopped at every small shop in the road and  were taking snaps at almost every location possible. Finally we returned back at around 4 and made the next stop at eco park. Eco park looks good with green grasses everywhere and natural and artificail trees adding some more beauty. Finally returned home after the long trip to catch a long undisturbed sleep. Yet upload the photos. Will upload and post the status.

Trek To TPK Hills.

It was a scorcher and it looked like the sun was trying with all its might to stop us. But we went on without minding the sun, fueled by the sudden enthusiasm that we acquired after we entered the final semester. The plan was to climb Thiruparankundram hills and explore a bit of it. It turned out to be an unforgettable experience. At first climbing the steps turned out to be a breath taking task. After that climbing the hills and rocks did not burn much of the calories though they looked a lot dangerous. In the begining the hills were not steep but as we climbed higher and higher it became an arduous task. But we never felt tired, and reached even those spots that were a lot steeper. Looked like we scaled every reachable point in the hill. The view of the city from the hill top was panoramic. We could see half of Madurai from the hill top. Thought there was a path with well built steps the shortcuts through the bushes and rocks were more inviting. The trek would have lost its luster if not for Vanniaperumal's Nokia N73 with 3.2 megapixel camera. We were able to take some good snaps with that. The best snap being the one showing Mr.Musi attempting a free fall dive into the rocks. Fortunately he escaped unscathed, though his jeans suffered some injury. If some misadventures like those are not taken into account, it could be called a great experience. It is a place in Madurai where u could isolate yourself from the maddening crowd and enjoy sometime with your friends. After spending about two hours in hill climbing and photography we returned back to the maddening crowd reluctantly. For the inquisitive readers, members constituting "we" include Musi, Praveen, Myself, Subramani, Sriram and Vanni. Managed to upload the files in picasa and they are available at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/sens2003